


Superstitions

by missdeviant



Category: The OC
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-01-04
Updated: 2004-01-04
Packaged: 2017-10-31 08:50:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/342182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/missdeviant/pseuds/missdeviant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He always comes back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Superstitions

**Author's Note:**

> My fic muses are mad that I abandoned them for presents and drinking this holiday season, and will not give me slash. Maybe this lil' ficlet will appease them.
> 
> Set between Pilot and The Homecoming.

When Theresa shivers, her mother tells her that someone just walked over the spot that will be her grave. When her ears pop and tingle, she is told that someone is talking about her. When she was nine, she was not allowed to keep the scruffy black cat that wandered into her parched yard one summer, despite her desperate wheedling pleas.

“No, mija.” her mother had admonished softly, drying her hands with a dishtowel. “We do not want to bring such bad luck into our house.”

Until she was eleven, she held her breath until her lungs ached and her fingers twitched impatiently when her family drove past the graveyard on their way to church. She threw salt over her shoulder and carefully swept up the pieces of the broken Tinkerbell compact so her mother could not claim seven years of bad luck were ahead.

When she was twelve, she promised herself that she was through with such old wives tales, yet moved on to what twelve year old girls do: pulling petals off daisies, telling fortunes with intricately folded bits of paper on lunch hours, asking questions of a deck of cards about the boys she liked.

“Does he like me? Will he ask me to the dance? Is he a virgin?” The last one would often evoke titters, but in a place like Chino, with boys like the ones she grew up with, fourteen and already sporting dangerous tufts of facial hair, it was a valid question.

At sixteen, Theresa likes to think she is past the superstitions of her childhood. Still, out of habit in a diner one day, she slides the white paper wrapper off of her straw with her acrylic nails, ties it in a knot, closes her eyes, and pulls.

She wonders if Ryan does this anymore, and if he does, if he thinks of her.

Ryan had no such quirks when she met him. Ryan didn’t do superstitions. He didn’t do books, movies, television, or music. He didn’t do musicals, not after he’d shown up with a welt on his back that she only saw faintly as he mowed his lawn one day, sweat pouring in rivulets.

He didn’t even do dances, except when she made him, and he’d sit on the sidelines as she’d dance in her beaded dress to Enrique Iglesias and Mandy Moore, sometimes retreating outside to share a smoke, a sip from a flask, more often a bottle, but he was always there when the dance ended, tasting of whiskey and cigarettes and something else that she couldn’t place so always just thought of as *him*.

Ryan did ratty baseball caps, worn low over bruised eyes. Ryan did quiet intensity, staring a teacher down as he sat as his desk, offering up blue-lined looseleaf sheets of homework that had been torn and then painstakingly pieced together with scotch tape until the teacher stumbled onto the next student.

And Ryan did her. Fucked her. God, did he fuck. The first time, her first time, he’d asked if she’d done this before, and she nodded as she put her hand on his bare shoulder and guided him down, feeling the vinyl of the car seat under her lower back, feeling much older than fourteen until he entered her with a sharp stab to her abdomen. He stopped for a moment, and looked into her eyes, which had grown wet around the edges, before she pressed her lips together with something akin to determination, nodded and he continued, slower, more delicately, until the hurt was replaced with something else, and her head fell back and rested against the door, as all the time Ryan watched her intently with open blue eyes.

Not much later, Theresa learned Ryan could always tell when someone was lying.

She learned that Ryan had quirks after all, just hidden. If he had other girls, which she knew he did, she was sure that they never knew the way that he wouldn’t pick up a tails down penny they saw lying on the sidewalk as they laughed their way home from the all-night diner that let them loiter over slowly diminishing Cokes and Theresa would feel really grown up, like she always did when she was around Ryan. She was sure that with other girls, Ryan would never let his guard down and show them tricks he’d learned to do, like trapping flies under ashtrays so they wouldn’t buzz around your food and making towers out of silverware.

In return, she’d taught him how to balance salt shakers and that the cheap paper wrapping of a straw could be used as a mystic fortune telling device. A break with the knot on the right meant no one was thinking about you. Left meant someone was, but not the person you wanted. If the knot snapped perfectly in two, then whoever you were thinking about was thinking about you too.

In her daydreams, the straw paper would always break perfectly down the center and Ryan would take her hand during these moments and they’d run away from Chino together like Romeo and Juliet, or Lloyd Dobler and Diane Court. But instead he would just push himself off of the shiny red seat, offer her a hand and help her to her feet, kissing the smudged eyeliner at the corners of her eyes and making sure she got into her house before the sun rose, and she'd stay up a minute longer, watching him disappearing down the dimly lit street through her screen door.

Even after those nights and early mornings, Ryan would still disappear from her life sometimes. There were weeks of summer where she wouldn’t see him at all, until he would turn up at her window late on a humid night, dirt under his nails, and pull her into him, onto the pink floral of her bedspread; run his hands up her body as their hips moved together and smile when she’d turn her head and bite her pillow because the walls were thin and her mother was sleeping not twelve feet away and Ryan would just keep grinning and come with a sound no more than a whisper.

She’d use a finger to wipe the sweat away from his hairline and tell him “I missed you,” and he’d say, “but I always come back” and smile with heavily lidded eyes and take her mouth in his and pass his hands over her bare stomach and up, rubbing her nipples with the pads of his thumbs and they’d be fucking again before she knew it, fifteen and clutching at the painted iron of her headboard with whitening knuckles as her moans caught and choked in soft fabric and polyester fill.

Most of the time, not all of the time but enough, he’d stay until Theresa fell asleep, and if it were a cool enough night, she’d awake to an empty room and her gauzy curtains blowing in the soft breeze from the open window.

Sometimes she thinks that he’ll come back, they’ll go for soft drinks and she’ll tie her straw paper in a knot and not even have to look down at her hands because he’ll be sitting across from her, eyes crinkling at the corners, blowing his straw paper back at her and offering her french fries with greasy fingers that she’ll lick the salt off of, never breaking his gaze.

But when Theresa opens her eyes, it’s still today, Ryan's still not there, and when she looks down at her parted fists the corners of her mouth fall a little as she sees the knot clutched in the fingers of her right hand.

The bit of paper flutters to the floor and she slides the straw between the ice of her Coke, evening out her expression.

She never believed in silly superstitions anyway. He has to come back. After all, he always did.

\--finis--  



End file.
